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If the pros are playing where the money is......why are they playing badminton? Sad but true.

To earn a living?

Not sure if you were aware...
But often times tournaments in north america were passed over by the top ranked badminton stars because the tournaments here did not offer much money, and conflicted with scheduling of other tournaments.
Occasionally you'd have a high profile/high ranked (eg. top 5 rank in the world) player come through... but few and far between
Many have tried, and with some degree of success to sponsor, and help raise the profile of badminton, to attract more top players to generate more excitement in the public eye...
However, its a vicious cycle.
Tough to compete against more popular sports...

"No money, no talk" I think the saying went.

Food on the table is nice... unfortunately not all our brothers and sisters are so fortunate

Well I play with both and like feathers more, however the goal is still to put the bird on your opponent's floor, and any open minded player would not whine about one not being the "real" game. But if you guys like to passionately get threads closed due to mavis vs feather debates...I guess you guys can go do that. However for me, plastic or feather, I'm always ready to play.

It is obviuous that a recreatinal player who can barely clear full court with any type of shuttle, and has neverexperienced a string-breakage :-) has a difference reference point in what is "the same" or "similar".. If you never hit a smash hard enough to notice the shirt folding on a nylon (or played against someone who does), you may not see the problem with the cone shirt.

Well I play with both and like feathers more, however the goal is still to put the bird on your opponent's floor, and any open minded player would not whine about one not being the "real" game. But if you guys like to passionately get threads closed due to mavis vs feather debates...I guess you guys can go do that. However for me, plastic or feather, I'm always ready to play.

Haha, I think if a moderator had desired this discussion to be over, and found it inappropriate, it would've been closed er... 3 pages ago. Anyway, yes, it has indeed become a moot discourse. There is little debate that feathers are more satisfying to play with, but there is a very prominent issue with favoritism and a lack of concession. Shuttles are not like programs or hardware. As feather shuttles were produced and used pervasively before anyone even had the idea to manufacture synthetic alternatives, and as these alternatives are attempting to mimic the flight pattern of these "real" shuttles, I wouldn't assume it could be possible to make them better than something that's already the "best". You can't exactly add more features to them. And, as people have said, the lack of real incentive for manufacturers to greatly improve on them with different materials and construction means that it will likely be a while before they can even match the flight pattern. I have yet to understand why these synthetic shuttles must be made with such patterns, and why synthetic feathers can't be implanted in corks and work wonderfully.

The beautiful game of badminton is feathers-based, not nylon. Nylon would only turn the game from beautiful to ugly and crude. It is precisely for this reason that the future of the beautiful game of badminton must ensure that its foundation, new in-coming youngsters, be trained and raised on a 'diet' of feathers. If they are brought up on nylon, you can say goodbye to any of them making it to any super series level. Starting young kids on nylon is like 'concreting' them with crude strokes and skills.
Just look at the quality and numbers of North American players that play at international tournaments now. They are falling down the ladder at an alarming rate and may even disappear soon. Even Vietnam has now overtaken them, and they do it with locals, not imports. Vietnamese are relatively very poor compared with North Americans, yet their youngsters are not fed plastics.

I also agree with kwun, generally, in my area, the developing players usually play with plastic birdies as they do not want to spend extra to just play for fun. 90% of the advanced players play with feather here.

I think this is precisely the cause of the problem for the falling standard of badminton in North America. Starting them young with nylon restricts and 'concretes' the full range of strokes and skills that only feathers provide.
We must prepare the present for the future, not to destroy it.
I think North America is heading towards falling off the cliff.

Well, you can talk to the sponsors of high school/collegiate teams about that. Then, you could say, it's not technically the fault of anyone but the administration of the organizations and their deals with sponsors.

Either way, there is no real school for training for badminton, unless you are picked out to be olympic material, which are very few people. This is very much unlike other countries.., where there are designated institutions, and the students are bred to play.

Wait a minute...are you being serious ? Any battered feather is anytime better than a new mavis 500..I COMPLETELY disagree with that statement. I can't stand playing with beaten up feathers.

In Asia you can find young kids who are not rich playing with old discarded feathers. Some of them may be 12 to 13 years old but they are pretty good.
Also all coaches in Asia always use discarded and battered feathers, never plastics, to train and drill their students. In Asia we just don't see plastics in the courts, only on the beaches and public parks.

Deja Vu

We have been through several shades of this argument before.
We have also been unable to either reach an end or see an end in the near distance

One reason is that everyone here is arguing from a user's perspective.
This is getting to be much like an iPhone owner against a Blackberry owner.
To each, his gadget is better than the other's... and reasoning be damned!

Now let us look at the facts. This year todate, how many North American players participated and performed well in the Malaysian Open, Korean Open, German Open, AE Open, Swiss Open, and India Open? Why were they so conspiciously missing or why is their standard at an all time low? I don't have figures to support my claim, but I think I may be right to point out these countries also have the highest percentage of players using plastics compared with other countries.
Perhaps North America should break away from the BWF and start its own PNABF (Plastic North America Badminton Federation). But in doing so they should refrain from calling a nylon a plastic shuttle, because no plastic can be a true shuttle. Only a high-drag bird qualifies to be called a shuttle. Perhaps 'racquet ball' will be more appropriate.